Toward Deep Learning Software Repositories

Abstract—Deep learning subsumes algorithms that automatically learn compositional representations. The ability of these models to generalize well has ushered in tremendous advances in many fields such as natural language processing (NLP). Recent research in the software engineering (SE) community has demonstrated the usefulness of applying NLP techniques to software corpora. Hence, we motivate deep learning for software language modeling, highlighting fundamental differences between state-of-the-practice software language models and connectionist models. Our deep learning models are applicable to source code files (since they only require lexically analyzed source code written in any programming language) and other types of artifacts. We show how a particular deep learning model can remember its state to effectively model sequential data, e.g., streaming software tokens, and the state is shown to be much more expressive than discrete tokens in a prefix. Then we instantiate deep le...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MSR
• Keywords: MSR 2015, Software Engineering